‘Tool of Genocide’: Israeli Author Renounces Citizenship
Occupied Palestine (Quds News Network)- Israeli author Avi Steinberg announced Thursday that he had officially renounced his Israeli citizenship, describing it as a “tool of genocide.”
In an op-ed for the left-leaning news publication Truthout, the author said that Israeli citizenship had “always been a tool of genocide” that legitimised settlers colonialism.
“Israeli citizenship is predicated on the worst kinds of violent crimes we know of, and on a deepening litany of lies intended to whitewash those crimes,” he said in the article.
Steinberg, who was born in occupied Jerusalem to American parents and raised in an Orthodox setting, cited a number of laws passed following Israel’s creation that legitimised colonialism and discrimination, including the 1948 Declaration of Independence, the Law of Return in 1950, and the 1952 Citizenship Law.
He argued that this paper trail was shaped by the 1948 Nakba, when Israeli forces expelled approximately 80 percent of the Palestinian population from their homeland, and the subsequent efforts by the settlers to secure international recognition.
“These are forged documents,” Steinberg said.
“The look of officialdom… [is] nothing other than this state’s slippery effort to conceal its fundamental unlawfulness.”
Explaining his parents’ migration to the US, Steinberg described the cognitive dissonance that allowed his parents “to become both American liberals who opposed the US invasion of Vietnam, while also acting as armed settlers of other people’s land”.
Steinberg was later to discover that the house he grew up in was owned by a Palestinian family who were violently expelled to Jordan and barred from returning.
“This 1-to-1 replacement was not a secret,” Steinberg said. Rather, it was a selling point to Israeli settlers drawn to the picturesque “native Arab charm” of these villages bereft from “actual native Arabs”.
“The Torah is routinely waved around by land-worshipping nationalists, but, if actually read, it is a record of prophetic rebuke against the abuse of state power,” he wrote for Truthout.
“Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism or Jewish history.”
